I thought about replacing the entire bottom part of the laptop, but then I looked at the screw layout and thought this is way too much effort for not much benefit. I am not lacking in rack space so I am okay with it being bulky.
Comment on Expanding my laptops HDD capacity
cRazi_man@europe.pub 6 hours ago
Excellent hack.
In case you’re a masochist like me and want a lot more work on your hands, then you could remove the whole laptop mobo and make its own case and make it more compact in the process.
I’ve done this recently to make a standalone machine out of a busted laptop. This can give you a single, more compact unit with all the parts inside. You can improve the cooling and noise too (by using desktop fans). Infact, with today’s ram prices, the reason I went down this route is because you can get broken laptops with soldered in DDR5 ram.
BarHocker@discuss.tchncs.de 4 hours ago
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 5 hours ago
I’ve gone this route! Anything with a busted screen is fair game to me, though I haven’t picked up any recently, mostly just tiny/mini/micros (and heavy on the lenovo tiny).
But a custom hacked up laptop can be a great option especially with tight space to work with
Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I’ve literally been considering exactly this for a media center. I already have a server built put of an old tower, but it’s got limited specs and I don’t want to bog down the other stuff running a gui and all that.
I’ve been pondering doing this to a broken iMac I’ve got.
It got donated to me by someone who needed to thin out his studio a bit, so it didn’t cost me a penny. But I took the screen off to give it a clean out and repaste, apparently didn’t tape it in place securely enough as a temporary measure, so the screen fell off. And smashed.
I did some swearing.
However, it’s still a surprisingly handy spec. 3.5ghz i5, 24gb RAM and a Radeon GPU. So I’ve been wondering about pulling the guts and turning it into a desktop, then making it my home server to replace the 2014 Mac mini I currently use.
ponderings intensify
cRazi_man@europe.pub 3 hours ago
Watch this guy’s video. He DIY restores a smashed iMac screen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FStfdGjAwc